Playing every hand early in a NL tourney

[tvdad]

Having seen many other people try this, I decided to give it a go myself. Playing fairly cheap multi-table NL hold'em tourneys at Planet, I would call every single preflop bet, regardless of my cards. After 8 tourneys (not nearly enough to form any sort of statistical analysis, I know) I have discovered that this seems to be a great strategy if you don't mind occasionally crashing out of a tourney in the first couple of hands.

The thing is, as long as you don't run across a monster flop for the other guy, most of the time he's going to back down if you bet the flop big after having called his preflop raise. People generally don't want to go out early, so they'll toss all but the best hands when faced with such a situation.

In 6 of the 8 tourneys so far, I have quadrupled my stack in the first 15-20 minutes. In the other two, I crashed out on the second and fourth hands (ouch!) If I do get the big early stack, I'm able to tighten up and pretty much coast to the final table. I made the money in 4 of the 8 tourneys.

Anybody else out there employing this odd, but apparently useful, strategy?

T

[t_perkin]

You need to play WAY more tourns before you can happily say that your strategy is any good. My bread and butter (not literally I am no pro!) is little money SnGs and I place in the money in around 65% of them but the variance can be very high. With a strategy like yours, which will have a very high variance, you need to play a few hundred or so before you have any solid idea of how things are going.
The fact of the matter is that these small money NL SnGs are full of such crap players that you can effectively consider half the field dead and gone. This means you are only playing 5 people, so you should be finishing in the money at least 60% of the time if you are a reasonable player.

Keep playing that way tho, I play super-tight at the beginning of tourns so i love running into people like you [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
(Note: I am not suggesting that what you are doing is wrong - just that there is a bit of scissors paper stone going on)

Tim

[tvdad]

I didn't mean to imply that I play this way in all tourneys. I've just been trying it at the cheap ones since those things are such free-for-alls anyway. If I paid good money for a tourney that pays well, I'll be tight as a drum at the beginning. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

T

[Gallopin Gael]

It kinda sounds like the strategy that Sklansky outlined in the tourney book.

You should try it in a more expensive tourney to see how it works against (what I assume) would be better players.